The Ten-Year Nap

by Meg Wolitzer

You, the brainy, restless female, were the one who had to keep your family life rolling forward like a tank. You, of all people, were in charge of snacks.

Everyone wanted forward motion; everyone wanted to be part of something that moved.

Whether her husband—if he existed—was uncommonly wifely, staying on top of the small and domestic and social and emotional and aesthetic details of the life they shared, so that the powerful, Hydra-headed wife would not have to manage them alone.

“Mason, do you ever wonder about what I do when you’re in school?” she suddenly asked him as he bent over his waffle. He looked at her, confused. “Is this a trick?” “No. No trick.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Stuff, I guess. Different things.” He looked decidedly uninterested in the question, and she knew, from his answer, that she was a mystery to her child and perhaps to her husband—an unmysterious mystery—as perhaps many women were, everywhere.

Life was difficult and strange; this was obvious to anyone who really paid attention.

But here in New York City, and all across the spread of anxious, professional America, it was different. Here, you were often defined by how you spent your day.

“Yes, show tunes, he loves them.” All the mothers had heard this about Dustin Kavanaugh, and it was always mentioned with a certain knowing inflection.

She remembered how, when you are so young, you rarely think about the direction or purpose of love. Instead, you just follow it wherever it goes.

Boys ran and ran, and then, when they were eventually tired, they sat and took things apart and put other things together, while girls quietly braided friendship bracelets out of little snippets of colored thread and gave each other the chills and promised lifelong fidelity.

That’s what parenthood is, basically.” “What do you mean?” Jill asked. “All these long waiting periods. And then things happen all of a sudden—these developmental growth spurts—and you end up saying, ‘I can’t believe it went by so fast.’ Even though everybody always warned you it would.”

She always had the sense that someone she loved was about to leave, that there would be an imminent experience of loss. It was better to be the one who leaves, Jill thought, than the one who is left.

They laughed, for it was easy to laugh and all hold the very same views; they had always done it, and it was like breathing.

She didn’t want to see herself accurately; she couldn’t bear the idea of such clarity.

When you lived a certain kind of life, pushed along by good colleges and internships and jobs and a shared, tranquil neighborhood and a world of privilege in which your children overlapped, you were inevitably part of a long chain of connections.

For who else received attention like this in adulthood? By the time childhood ended, all the benevolence that had been directed toward you just because you were young and your hair was silky and you hadn’t yet been spoiled by the grit and hailstorms of life unfairly changed into a kind of indifference. Suddenly you, who had once been youthful and golden and special, were now treated as just another customer waiting in line for something. The world was suspicious of you; you weren’t so special after all. Unless, of course, you were in love. Briefly, two people in love received the attention of everyone.

At age eighteen, both of them were still virgins, though periodically beset by silent, unbearable longings for other people, which they never summoned up the nerve to vocalize or act upon.

was midnight, too late to get a phone call, but Jill didn’t stiffen in the way that many people did when the phone rang at that hour, and this was for one reason: Her parents were both already dead.

When you reached the age of forty, Jill thought, you didn’t need new friends. Apparently you shouldn’t have new friends; they would only disappoint you.

But off at work all day, Donald was cordoned off from his daughter’s limitations. When he returned home from the city at night, Nadia’s loving nature was so appealing to him that she probably seemed to be the most articulate and unusual child on earth. Maybe he had even been serious about the beauty of her bud vase. Maybe he was so much in love with her that she shimmered with greatness, blinding him.

Many of the boys and girls of America were now as oversubscribed and overextended as executives. Their mothers were their secretaries, keeping track of the children’s calendars, running slightly behind them as they went from piano lesson to fencing to papermaking to martial arts to the homes of other children and then back out into the world. Jill would not keep such a schedule with Nadia. She would not be part of this particularly American obsession, and she knew this now.

Your personal history of pain, by the time you reached the age of forty, was supposed to have been folded thoroughly into the batter of the self, so that you barely needed to acknowledge it anymore.

Work is play, or at least all good work is play. All work that is pleasurable feels pleasurable in the same way that play once did.

She pulled him toward her and kissed him, and other people saw this moment and glanced over and smiled as they kept walking. It was a sudden instance of emotion just popping out of the day.

But now her husband had somehow gotten himself deep inside the private club of professional success; he had said the password, and the thick door had swung open, welcoming him in, and he was in a cool oaken room, sitting stunned but confident in a club chair.

Here and in L.A. and perhaps in London and wherever else there were important jobs and the feeling of a stirring economy, utility often beat quietly inside friendship, and you quickly assessed the way that the other person might be helpful to you, even at a distant point in the future.

work did not make you interesting; interesting work made you interesting.

You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.

Love was stronger than reluctance, or at least you had to make it be. You had to do everything you could to return the husband to the wife, and the wife to the husband; to pull her on top of him with mouths open and the door locked, and a child sleeping somewhere on the other side of it.

It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.

The long view over time of anyone’s story was surprising but inevitable, and inevitably sad.

But mostly, though, he knew that if you longed for what you did not have, then you would be one of those unhappy people you could find anywhere in any setting, the ones who couldn’t appreciate what they had as long as they saw something they did not have.

But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.